Evolution of Dynamic Collaboration between Contract Manufacturer and Branded Firm: A Case Study of the Value Migration in Notebook Industry

• Main Authors: Han-Chen Tsai, 蔡漢章
• Other Authors: Yea-Huey Su
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2005
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/38510153802547081145

碩士 === 國立中央大學 === 資訊管理研究所 === 93 === With increasing time-to-market pressure and trend of rapid introduction of new products with shorter and shorter life cycle, an effective supply chain to reduce cost and improve service levels has become essential for branded firms to face fierce competition in the global market. Outsourcing strategy is essential for branded firms to create a long-term relationship with their virtually integrated contract-manufacturing partners. Most researches in supply chain management emphasized the competition between supply chains from the standpoint of branded firms, and focused on how to optimize the whole supply chain. Means, such as implementation of advanced information technology (IT), are used to enable the base-line competitiveness. It is critical for the disadvantaged party within a supply chain (such as a contract manufacturer) to concern whether information transparency due to IT leads to the leading branded firm dominates the supply chain or not. Fortunately, our preliminary field study demonstrated that (1) “the winner takes all” within a supply chain never occurred but contract manufacturers become multi-branded contract manufacturer as a total solution/service provider, (2) contract manufacturers have upgraded their capabilities and gradually become the complementors rather than merely the suppliers of leading branded firms, and (3) there exists the evolutionary value migration (or boundary shift) between contract manufacturer and branded firm within a supply chain. The goal of this research is then to explore what the dynamic collaborative relationship (or evolutionary boundary shift) between contract manufacturer and branded firm in a supply chain is and what the determinants for this dynamic collaborative relationship are. By exploring a typical case of Quanta and Dell in the notebook industry, this study found that the boundary between these two firms evolved in four phases with different contract scheme and will be evolving. The four phases are (1) OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturing), (2) ODM (Original Design Manufacturing), (3) JDM (Joint Design Manufacturing), and (4) IDM (Innovation Design Manufacturing). It is clearly that Quanta and Dell continuously change their business models and interactive relationship in every phase. However, the academic understanding of this issue is still a puzzle. Previous studies have imported transaction cost theory and competitive advantage to interpret the issue of firm boundary (Afuah, 2003) but failed to catch the evolutionary aspect of boundary shift. We proposed a synthesis multi-discipline perspective that integrates game theory (Breandenburger & Nalebuff, 1996) and independence/dependence capability (Fine, 1998) to tackle the issue of evolutionary boundary shift. This study would contribute to draw a tentative theoretical foundation to general theory of dynamic collaboration of vertical dis-integrated partners in a supply chain.